The author on a VR waterslide in Germany. Because why not? Malcolm Burt, Author provided
Rollercoasters have come a long way since the theme park rides of old, as thrill-seekers and park operators look for the next big thing.
The trend in the early 2000s was for higher, faster and loopier rides that arguably peaked with the 206km per hour Kingda Ka rollercoaster at Six Flags, New Jersey, in the United States. At 139m (456ft) it’s currently the world’s tallest rollercoaster.
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Hold on, virtually, on the Kraken Unleashed.
Journey into the virtual world
On my recent trip I took a ride on the Iron Dragon, at Cedar Point in Ohio. On this ride you are physically aboard a suspended coaster, but the VR experience sees you flying through an old-timey village while ogres and orcs attack you.
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Aboard Iron Dragon – while you look a twit with a VR headset on, the experience inside is marvellous. Malcolm Burt, Author provided
Another VR ride I tried is The Daemon, at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Denmark, a compact triple-looping floorless coaster in reality.
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Prof Ann-Marie Pendrill, from Lund University, and I didn’t let pouring rain stop our VR experience. Malcolm Burt, Author provided
In VR it’s a journey through a surreal Chinese landscape in a flying bucket filled with fireworks, while dragons and bears fight to bring you down (honestly, it makes sense on the ride).
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A long way down.
Even the humble water slide becomes an opportunity to pilot a canoe down an exploding volcano. That’s me in the main story image (top), taking a spin on a yet-to-be opened VR water slide experience I consulted on at the Galaxy Erding water park in Munich, Germany.
The advantages of going VR for theme parks are multiple. It’s relatively easy to trick the brain into thinking it’s somewhere else, and it’s substantially cheaper to create a VR attraction than a traditional coaster or flat ride. These experiences can also be updated quickly (think of a Christmas or Halloween-themed version of an existing offering).
But from my research so far, rider reactions have been varied. Thrill-seekers consistently told me they want “more story” from these attractions, which suggests that while we rush to embrace flashy technology, we still have an inherent need for narrative — we still want to be told a story. And while many park-goers love the novelty, purists curiously dismiss these VR experiences as “not real”.
The complaint that VR rides are essentially solitary and that they erase the traditional shared experience on rides is a little fairer.
Mixed reality (where you can see other riders through your headsets) or high-tech avatars of ourselves and our friends inserted in the VR ride experience might temper this.
The virtual theme park
What does VR entertainment mean for the future of theme parks and rides? The park of the future might look quite different to what it does now.
They could become nondescript warehouses where all the action and wonder takes place in the VR headsets inside, which is what Zero Latency does in Melbourne, Brisbane and other locations across the globe.
But what if we bypassed the theme park completely?
There is an entire industry devoted to bringing authentic VR entertainment experiences into your home.
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Our amusement future?
The Oasis offers a place where Watts says “people come for all the things they can do, but they stay because of all the things they can be”, and it presents a glorious vision of Peak VR – until everybody starts killing each other, of course.
Let’s hope the real VR amusement of the future won’t go quite that far.
Source: The Conversation